The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

by Douglas Murray

Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously embodied this thinking in passages like this from Book II of Emile, or On Education (published in English in 1763) in which he writes: ‘The first movements of human nature are always right. There is no original perversity in the human heart. There is not a single vice to be found in it of which it cannot be said how and whence it entered. In relation to others, he must respond only to what nature asks of him, and then he will do nothing but good.’34 People who believe this strain of thought must find a culprit for their own failings and the failings of every other person around them, since they were born in such a state of grace. Inevitably such thinking spills out into a belief that simpler, older or earlier societies somehow provide an example of something worth going back to.

So you quote a person saying it is good.. It is good all of a sudden?